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People forget what you said.
People forget what you did.
But people never forget how you made them feel.

With wealth you can live in comfort.
With drive you can make a comfortable living.
With peace of mind, you can be comfortable in living

Knowingness is murderous of wonder and of insight, and ultimately it does a violent disservice to that which it sought to serve.

The wise see knowledge and action as one.

Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed, we can't make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning -- much less set strategy for a company or for a human life. Nothing is more practical than for people to deepen themselves. The more you understand the human condition, the more effective you are as a businessperson. Human depth makes business sense.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Here is a simple but powerful rule Â… always give people more than they expect to get.

The teacher, if indeed wise, does not bid you to enter the house of their wisdom, but leads you to the threshold of your own mind.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

A society that has no rules is abhorrent, but a society that only stays within the letter of the law is not much better.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

What we need is moral leadership. Plato and Aristotle said the four cardinal virtues are justice, wisdom, courage, and self-control. I think they're still right, 2,500 years later.

Which questions guide our lives? Which questions do we make our own? Which questions deserve our undivided and full personal commitment? Finding the right questions is crucial to finding the right answers.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

...No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

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A "stop doing" list is more important than a "to do" list.

What I've learned about business owners and human beings is that they respect wisdom but obey pain.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

The great Western Disease lies in the phrase, "I will be happy when..."

"Everything happens for a reason" is no reason not to ask myself if I am living it right.

Intelligent folks learn from their own mistakes; wise folks learn from the mistakes of others.

If we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our own humanness-our willingness to act from our conception of who we are, regardless of the consequences.

Gratitude for blessings is the most exalted of all virtues. The measure of one's existence is enhanced in proportion to the strength of his spirit of gratitude.

We all feel some degree of gratitude. I have always thought that young people who feel strongly the sense of gratitude are the ones who will grow and accomplish the most.

Youth is not a time of life - it is a state of mind; it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over love of ease.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair - these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

So long as your heart receives a message of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from the earth, from man and from the Infinite, you are young.

When the wires are all down and all the central place of your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then you are grown old indeed and may God have mercy on your soul.
- Given to MacArthur by John W. Lewis. It is based on a poem written by Samuel Ullman of Birmingham, Alabama.

The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.

I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I'm not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I've reached that state am I qualified to speak. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life.

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.
- A.E. Houseman

You can say, who wants to go through life anticipating trouble? Well I did. All my life I've gone through life anticipating trouble. And here I am, going along in my 84th year and like Epectitus, I've had a favored life. It didn't make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn't hurt me at all. In fact it helped me.

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.

Conventional wisdom is often long on convention and short on wisdom.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” “Any job worth doing is worth doing well,” and “Handsome is as handsome does.” Those are all the kinds of things your grandmother used to say, and they probably can’t be said too often. Samuel Johnson once observed that we “more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”

There are only two ways of spreading light—to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.